There was a seasonal dip to housing permits in Minneapolis – St Paul for January to 408 single family homes. This is a drastic year over year increase from 297 single family home in January 2014.

I suspect we will see a continued increase in single family building permits in the Twin Cities throughout 2015. As you can see in the graph; we are making improvements but still a ways away from the previous trends.

The Composite 20 posted a .7% gain Seasonally Adjusted for the same period.

I personally like to see our marketplace posting modest gains below the Composite 20. As we have experienced before, rapid price increases (aka bubbles) isn’t always the best thing for the housing market! This slow steady pace of housing value increase combined with low unemployment numbers in the Twin Cities reassures me that we are coming back to a healthy housing market locally.

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The Unemployment rate in Minneapolis/St Paul is at 3%, which we haven’t seen since the late 1990’s. The national Unemployment Rate is at 5.8% for November 2014. If we are to assume this is a good measure of the economy, then I would say things are back in full swing. I am still cautioned because of the way the unemployment rate is calculated, it does not paint a full picture of employment situation. A better representation would the Labor Force Participation Rate, but unfortunately that data is not available for the Twin Cities metro area that I am aware of.